The upside to embedded reporters.

Matt Hoy has returned!

By the way, that global warming thing is a bitch. I mean, golly, snowstorms in NYC in April?

They used to have snowstorms until June, in Queens. Then global warming set in, and now they only last until April.

Bleeping, bloody...

It's gonna be below 60 at night where I live for a while. And I live in the South, dammit.

This article suggests, by negative implication, that we should crown Donald Rumsfeld "Emperor for Life."

Conversations last week with a dozen of Mr. [George H. W.] Bush's friends and close advisers turned up nothing to dispel the view of him as an internationalist worried about the influence of the go-it-alone hawks in his son's administration. He is most concerned, they said, about the need to jump-start the Middle East peace process after the conflict and about how the United States and the United Nations will sort out their conflicting roles in administering a postwar Iraq.

With due respect to a man who served his country nobly and ably for decades: You were a one-termer, and something of a squish. You are one of three Presidents in the 20th Century to lose your re-election bid, joining those two other greats, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. I happen to think you were better than either; but before we go acclaiming your foreign policy insight, and follow your suggestions, let's review the fruit of your decisions:

End Gulf War I Before Driving Saddam Hussein Out of Power: Twelve years of crushing sanctions; Gulf War II.

Force the Israelis to the Peace Table: Give Yassir Arafat a national redoubt, equipped and financed by the E.U. and the U.S., from which to slaughter Israeli civillians; make the Israelis more intractable than ever; give Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Jihad, and too many other groups to count breathing room to slaughter the innocent.

Invade Panama: No real effect. Failure to re-take Panama Canal that Carter gave away. Failure to get more Latin American players for MLB teams.

Try to Hold Soviet Union Together While It Was Tearing Itself Apart: Increase the cost and recovery time of rebound from decades of communism; help legitimize a regime that slaughtered and terrorized hundreds of millions; help Boris Yeltsin seem like a heroic genius.

I'm leaving to the side "inertia" policy, i.e., doing what others had done before, like treating Mobutu Sese Seko as anything other than the tinpot loony he was, and sending a rep to the United Nations. I don't blame you for those, or at least, I don't blame you for those more than I blame your predecessors.

Sorry, kid. A batting average like that would send you out of the minors, for the love of Pete. It is -- and, blessedly/sadly, was -- enough to keep you out of a second term in the majors. (Of course, the call-up in your place was even worse...)

MedPundit has a summary of a book review that's available to NEJM subscribers, of the book Whiplash and Other Useful Illnesses. The review's central point, and Ms. Smith's, is this:

There have been studies that show that injuries take longer to resolve when there are unresolved compensation issues - such as lawsuits and worker’s compensation. And although this is only anecdotal evidence and nothing to base public policy on, I’ve noticed in my practice that patients recover in a matter of days to weeks when they’re the ones at fault, compared to patients who are the victims of accidents, who take months to get better.

And the time for recovery does clearly seem to be related to compensation. This is what happens. A person has an accident, and as a result sprains their neck. As in any sprain, the pain is at its worst the first few days, then it gradually gets better. But, even when things are mostly better, there are still, on occasion, twinges of brief pain that come and go. For the person not involved in litigation, these twinges are barely noticed because they’ve moved on. Their injuries are no longer a major focus of their lives. They perceive these twinges as nothing more than the usual aches and pains that everyone suffers now and then.

But, the person who is trying to get compensation for their injuries, either through the legal system or the worker’s comp system, has the constant fear that things might get worse. Once they settle the case, that’s it. No future claims will be paid by the other party. So, when they feel those twinges, their inclination is to wonder if they might be harbringers of worse things to come, of disabilities that won't be compensated. That anxiety only serves to magnify the pain. Which keeps the case open. Which costs society a lot of money.

I've wondered about this for some time. We get a broad range of folks in here -- most are decent sorts, some are nose-to-the-grindstone, some are a tad more... relaxed. But to a one, the longer litigation drags on, the longer their healing seems to be arrested.

There are two points here, to which Ms. Smith is not alluding:

First, it costs money to get medical treatment. A lot of our clients get little to no medical treatment, because the insurance companies (cough, the ones we're suing) won't pay for medical treatment -- so of course healing takes longer during litigation. (A couple of our cases started because the buggers wouldn't even pay out for medical bills of all things.) Worker's comp cases frequently end up in the system because the insurer decides that the herniated disc you're suffering from isn't that bad. Just walk it off.

Second, the actual stress of a case is enormous. Most people don't experience litigation, but for those of us on the inside one way or another, you can see these folks worrying -- unpaid bills from the injury and healing time, lost credit, waiting medical treatment, and so on, can really eat at you. I can't imagine that has no impact on one's recovery.

Blinkered system, really. If it weren't the least bad one we have, I'd junk it in a heartbeat.

On that story, by the way, I'm not sure how I feel about the result of the opinion. I have no empirical problem with some sort of relationship between the level of damage suffered and the scope of the punitive damage; you shouldn't tag a supermarket chain with $300,000,000 in punitives for a spill in one of its stores that leads to a broken hip. On the other hand, "proportionality" is sort of a tricky thing, and I'd usually leave it to the jury to figure that one out. In a wrongful death case, is punitives ten times the economic damages proportionate? Six? One hundred? I don't like bright lines in situations like these, because so many different kinds of cases, with so many different causes of action, come before the courts.

That leads to why I have a problem with the result of the case in every other sense. This really should have been left to the states. A lot of states already have hard caps on punitive damages (which is to say, a flat figure, above which one cannot go); I'd argue that such a cap comes very close to a constitutional issue in itself. Those states that don't have caps are considering them. For the Supreme Court to go making up (yet another) rule, another malleable test -- well, let's just say that if Dred Scott couldn't teach them the danger of that ("substantive" due process), nothing I say here could make a difference.

Because remember, Antonin Scalia is a dimwitted conservative whose opinions always bear out his personal prejudices.

It is for this reason that I call Jack Balkin an ass.

Golly. Can anyone else say casus belli?

At one of the palaces, half a dozen Syrian soldiers were found, one of them hiding in a refrigerator, military officials said. The Republican Guards responsible for the security of the palace had fled.

Any comment would be superfluous.

Hat tip: Tacitus.

Remember that tort reform post I kept promising?

Here it is. This post -- by a lady I rather respect -- set it off.

Before you read any farther, please check out the post to which I am referring. It's not fair to her to rely merely on my excerpts for rebuttal. She has good points, worth answering; this post will be here when you get back.

Ms. Smith writes:

As usual, the trial lawyer association argues that caps for noneconomic damages only penalize the injured. (Funny, they never mention how caps also penalize trial lawyers.) This idea that an award of millions of dollars somehow compensates for injury deserves to be challenged.

I am officially saying it: Caps on noneconomic damages do penalize trial lawyers. Fair enough. But before we continue down this vane (and, no pun, vein), let me explain how most medical malpractice suits work:

You get someone in your office who's injured. They think it's the doctor's fault. You have to talk to them, get copies of their medical records (this starts to add up -- but more on that in a second), and generally have a feel for the compensability of injuries, before you can decide whether or not to take the case. Put simply, medical malpractice cases aren't worth it unless they're, well, worth it.

Ah ha! The Evil Trial Lawyer admits that the members of the ATLA are in it for the money!

Not quite. Let me continue, and you'll see why.

Assume that the case is worth it -- by "worth it," I mean that the verdict, if things break correctly (by which I mean, the jury verdict is large enough to cover all damages) exceeds $50,000 for small cases, and $150,000 for larger cases. More on those numbers in a second. The lawyer must then -- as almost all of these are done on a contingency basis (if we win, we collect a percentage of the award, and costs; we lose, we get nothing) because the plaintiffs are poor (more on that below) -- shell out the following costs, at minimum:

Acquire medical records. $100-1,000.
Retain a physician as expert witness: $3,000.
Filing fees: $25-$100
Service on one to twenty defendants (doctor plus any other entities liable): $15-$1,000
Cost of deposing defendant(s): $4,000 to $45,000 (depends on court reporters, states, travel expense, number of depositions required, and way too many other factors to label easily here)
Cost of deposing opponent's expert(s): $6000 to $75,000 (these folks -- cough, doctors -- charge dearly for their time, and the side taking the deposition must pay; also, in one case of which I know, deposition costs exceeded $150,000, but that was an unusual case by any measure)
Travel costs: $20 to $2,000 (varies with case, locus of injury, etc.)
Printing costs (for all those pesky motions): $150 at least
Expert preparation for trial/ expert(s)' trial cost: $3,500 to $40,000 (a case we finished up a while ago had expert costs in excess of $60K, but that was (another) unusual case)
Lost time from paying cases (admittedly, something of a double cost, and a theoretical): unknown, but something along the lines of $10,000 to $800,000 (multiply $125/hr by, say, one thousand hours over six years, including appeals, cross appeals, and various disruptive and set aside motions; then keep in mind that few medical malpractice cases are handled by a single lawyer -- this is a fair estimate)
Postage: Adds up, let's say $300 over three years (that's on the low end, trust me)
Copying costs: $1,000 (Requests for production, etc. -- also adds up way too quickly)

None of this includes the enormous number of man-hours that go into such a case. The average lawyer bills around $125 per hour or so (some more, some less) when we're getting paid; we're doing this essentially for free until the verdict comes in. Looking through some of my notes, I spent one hundred hours over the course of three months doing preliminary research on a case involving neural damage, spinal injury, and stroke. And that's not the record. (We didn't take that case, so that was time down the drain.)

It costs a lot to bring a case to trial.

All of this is fine, you say, but it ignores Ms. Smith's basic point: Who cares/ it's just trial lawyer expenses/ y'all get rich off of this.

Actually, it goes right to the point. We can't bring a case like this unless it looks like the doctor's really liable, which is to say, he did something so far outside the standard of care -- screwed up so far beyond what a normal doctor would do -- that a jury will see it and attribute the fault to him; unless the plaintiff is badly harmed (the shorthand is "permanent, crippling disability"); and unless it looks like there will be a lot of money in it. Put more succinctly: It costs a great deal of money to go after the doctors who screw up badly, and badly hurt their patients. If you do not believe that there should be some justice in such a case -- or, in a less loaded way, that someone should pay -- then you doubtless could care less. But, without stepping on the soapbox, there are a lot of doctors who do a lot of bad things. Most don't. I'm rather fond of my doctor, and my kid's doctor, and my wife's doctor. They're dedicated, intelligent people, and I have no doubt that -- assuming they make mistakes -- they do so in the way that reasonable doctors do, i.e., they are not negligent. Indeed, I'm willing to bet that most doctors are not negligent over the course of their lives. They may make mistakes, but negligence is a different monster altogether. I'm willing to concede that even those few who are negligent are rarely negligent to the extent of grievously harming their patients.

But.

There are doctors who screw up badly, and sometimes often. Ignoring this doesn't make it go away. And people get hurt, or, yes, killed. We just got a case with one of those.

And it costs money to bring them to heel. Sure, lawyers make money off of this; that's why we do it, in part. (Remember, capitalism is usually good -- related note: Why is it ok to glory in the free market for everyone but lawyers?) (It's not as much as you might think.) But we can't bring those doctors -- who have lawyers one way or another, usually from larger firms -- to justice without the money to fund those operations. That's part of why we seek out the big cases -- so we can afford to do it, and because the jury will usually (correctly, in my mind) only reward those who are badly hurt -- and that, in turn, is why you hear so much about giant awards in the news.

And all of this ignores the costs we have to go through for cases we reject, or lose. That's not a small amount of money, in real terms, or opportunity costs.

Which leads to my second point. Ms. Smith uses an example of one of her patients to argue that money can't buy you relief from pain and suffering. True as charged. But how else do you make them whole? You can't undo the pain, and quite frequently, you can't even manage it out of existence.* The law is, in a lot of ways, a pretty imperfect tool. It has two ways to make people right: Money and equity. Money is obvious in its implications and limitations. Equity basically seeks to force people to act in such a way as to make everyone whole, as fairness dictates. If we could get those badly hurting -- or dead -- people fixed through injunctions, I assure you, we'd do so, and the money be damned. But then again, that implies that we could get doctors, or someone, to fix that condition under court order; and for reasons ranging from impossibility (I know I can't raise the dead) to the Thirteenth Amendment (we don't like to force people to perform labor, for some reason), this isn't practical.

That leaves money. I'm sorry. It's the nature of the system. We have no other way to compensate those people for the pain, and loss, they experience.** If anyone -- and I'm not just tagging on MedPundit here -- can think of an alternative, I'm not kidding, I'm interested. Pop over to Tell me your thoughts on the left and let me know.

It's poor compense, but it's all we've got.

Ms. Smith's other point is this:

Putting caps on non-economic damages would not change any of this, of course. My patient would be equally bitter and dysfunctional no matter what the justice system did. And that's precisely my point - large monetary awards do not alleviate pain and suffering. They do, however, drive malpractice insurance companies - and doctors - out of business.

Here's the carrot. I'll be the first to admit that pain does not vanish with loads of money. (But see above on why it's the next best thing.) AND I'll admit that the malpractice practice is hurting the medical industry. And I'll admit that I have no damned idea how to solve the problem, because doing it Ms. Smith's way -- capping left and right -- is only gonna leave a lot of badly hurt people without enough to get by on, and keeping the status quo is gonna leave us sans médecins fairly soon. And I'm not smart enough to see the way around it.

But I will tell you this. Cap punitives if you want -- as long as you put in an automatic escalator, so the capped value still hurts in twenty years -- but cap pain and suffering, or even (as some argue) ordinary damages, and economic damages -- and understand the consequences: You'll leave folks who are badly wounded without any recourse, and a lot worse off than they were before that doctor touched them. And there, I'll fight you.

------
* Ms. Smith is conflating economic and non-economic damages. The award her patient apparently got was in part to handle future medical expenses (assisted living, custom housing) -- an economic damage.

** I should also add that for some reason (truly) lost on me, the poor get the crud end of the stick more often than middle class and rich folks do. I don't think it's because most doctors don't like Medicaid patients, or are wantonly sloppier in those cases. But for some reason, the vast bulk of med mal clientele is made up of the poor. They have no way to fix themselves, save those non-economic damages.

UPDATE: MedPundit graciously posts my response, then offers some closing thoughts. Obviously, I can't speak for all of the lawyers out there, especially the huge plaintiff's firms; nonetheless, the costs, real and opportunity, I laid out are pretty much dead-on.

H.D. Miller says better than I would have something I've been meaning to write about the last couple of days:

This period of felicitous climate in the Central Middle Ages has long been known as The Little Optimum; called "optimum" because the warmer climate enabled a flourishing of agriculture in Northern Europe. England, which during the Little Optimum enjoyed the climate of Central France, even developed a substantial wine industry, an industry which was frozen out of existence at the start of the Little Ice Age. It was also during this period that Viking explorers gave Greenland its improbable name and found grape vines growing as far north as present-day Newfoundland.

Full caveat: I'm no Medievalist, but as part of one of my hobbies, and as part of my course of study in undergrad, a good grasp of English and Western Continental (and indeed, Continental) history from about 900 A.D. to about 1500 A.D. was vital. So I'd forgotten the term "Little Optimum," but I did know this:

Military conquests are both easier and less likely in warmer temperatures. If it's warmer, it's easier to move around; swing armies over sea and land; keep your troops supplied; fight longer days, during longer periods of the year, than otherwise; and keep your troops from dying of illness and starvation in general. It's also possible to build up food reserves, so that you don't need to be as worried about leaving during harvest time.

But, because harvests are more bountiful, and winters less harsh, two of the biggest causes of conflict become less. War happens less frequently, as one professor of mine liked to put it, because there's less to fight over, and more to get drunk and get laid over. (His words, not mine.) Populations grow. Political systems mellow, because resources are less scarce.

Put it this way: Aside from the spate of millennial violence right after 1,000, Europe was a pretty calm place, all things considered, during that Little Optimum. Then check out what happened at the end -- the Great Schism (or the Second Great Schism, I lose track), the meaningless Crusades, the Welsh revolt, the Hundred Years' War, the Scot revolt, the purging of the Knights Templar, famine, plague, Catharists, Spiritualists, Albigensians, burned Jewish ghettoes, and so on, and so on.

H.D., of course, could and did make this point better. But it's late, and I'm rambling.

If you're looking, you'll notice a few upgrades.

Like I said, bit by bit.

Patrick Ruffini and VodkaPundit are up soon. So is the original Brothers Judd site, and the Travelling Shoes webzine.

More to come, kids.

Wow.

Read the whole thing.

I've got a [bleep]-load of work, so one last thing:

I give to you proof that good things happen when we take a cue from the Israelis.

LATE UPDATE: It works for the Israelis, it works for us.

Damn MedPundit. I spend all morning getting worked up about cruddy doctors, and she has to go and post this.

There's a reason she's listed at the left, folks.

The quagmire continues:

U.S. Army troops and armored vehicles entered Baghdad in large numbers this morning for the first time, military officials said, probing toward the heart of an Iraqi capital now ringed by U.S. forces.

After armored Marine columns pushed to the eastern outskirts of Baghdad on Friday and Army troops seized full control of the international airport, the U.S. forces appeared to have Baghdad and its 5 million inhabitants in a vise by day's end, with Marines in the east, Army brigades to the south and west and Special Operations forces blocking the main highway leading north.

This morning, two task forces from the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, with at least 20 Abrams tanks and 10 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, entered the city from the south. The force moved as far north as the Tigris River, near the city center, then veered west to the airport, Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart said in a briefing at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar.

And no sooner do I finish saying that than this happens:

U.S. armored forces rolled into parts of Baghdad on Saturday, smashing through Iraq's Republican Guard to reach the ultimate destination of their two-week surge across southern Iraq. In one skirmish, Marines with bayonets battled Arab fighters from abroad in a marsh on Baghdad's outskirts.

While Iraqi television played patriotic music and soldiers and militiamen loyal to President Saddam Hussein vowed to keep fighting, resistance to the American onslaught seemed tenuous. The U.S. sweep left burning tanks and bodies of Iraqi fighters behind.

"American armored combat formations have moved through the heart of Baghdad, defeating the Iraqi troops we have encountered," said Navy Capt. Frank Thorp, a U.S. Central Command spokesman.

Oh, yeah, we're doomed.

I would like to announce that I have received the most grotesque porn email I've ever seen, and yes, that says a lot:

It's titled "Bulimic Girls Getting Their Protien [sic] Injection..[sic]"

You can figure out the, pardon the pun, thrust of the text of the email if you try.

I used to have a more libertarian perspective on pornography. Give me a few more emails like this, and I'll make Andrea Dworkin look tame.

So I just got done listening to NPR for the better part of two hours. I've learned two things:

First, it's not the left-wing bias, worldview, commentary, or writing that gets to me. I can deal. It's the music. Michael Kelly died today (requiem aeternas), and the music that played after the memorial peace was more jingly and upbeat than the funereal dirge they played when announcing that U.S., U.K., and Australian forces were within twenty miles of Baghdad.

The music ranges from inappropriate to insulting to jarring.

The second problem is not with NPR. It goes like this: I think a significant percentage of the black community in this country is in the middle of a delusional psychosis. I don't think every black American is like Maxine Waters -- God forfend -- and I know NPR was looking to play up opposition to war in Iraq in the black community, but:

The sheer begging for socialism is insane. More money for housing! Right. Ever hear of something called "the projects"? My dad grew up in them (for a little while) when they were only government-built and funded slums ... before they went downhill. Always paid for and cared for by HUD, by the way. I wanna know how much a 21,000 pound bomb costs, anyway! They can find the money for that, and there are people starving in this country! In order: A Daisy Cutter, which is about one third the size of a MOAB, costs $27,000 per. As a rule, (conventional) bombs get slightly cheaper with size, but for the sake of argument, let's say each MOAB costs $81,000. So? Ten of those is $810,000. At one hundred, you'd have enough to seed the funding for an additional level of incompetents to oversee Social Security! Think the lines are bad, the customer service actually evil, and the outlays pitiable now? Let's see what happens when you drop a whole new shock team of bureaucrats in! If you think that money would actually go out in the form of classic income transfers, I have a bridge on Long Island I'd like to offer you. And anyway, starving? You gotta be shitting me. I watch my paycheck bleed every week so that the poor kids nearby (and far away) can get fat -- and rest assured, they do.

This, ladies and germs, is what I'm talking about. It's nuts. I can't bring myself to believe most black people are this crazy; it simply wouldn't make sense. I'm forced to conclude that either a small group of nutcases, who comprise the majority of these sentiments in the black community, showed up at one well-covered rally; or a sizable enough percentage of black Americans are nuts to give an impression of the whole.

Ok, this sucks: Jimmy's hanging it up.

I understand why -- believe me -- but it still sucks.

Let's hope he comes back soon.

You may have noticed that my page has changed several times over the last several days.

You're right. It has.

I'm trying to add, bit by bit, little changes, so that the whole thing doesn't go kablooey on me. Hence, I just now added Rachel Lucas. More to come.

I was having a really lousy day before I read this:

Incensed fans walked out of Pearl Jam's concert Tuesday after lead singer Eddie Vedder impaled a mask of President Bush on a microphone stand, then slammed it to the stage.

Most of Vedder's antiwar remarks earlier in the Pepsi Center show were greeted with mixed cheers and scattered boos. But dozens of angry fans walked out during the encore because of the macabre display with the Bush mask, which he wore for the song Bushleaguer, a Bush- taunting song from the band's latest album, Riot Act.

"When he was sharing his political views in a fairly benign manner - supporting our troops, opposing policy - that's OK," said Keith Zimmerman, of Denver.

"When he takes what looks like the head of George Bush on a stick, then throws it to the stage and stomps on it, that's just unacceptable. I love Pearl Jam, but that was just way over the edge. We literally got up and left."

Why did this put me in such a good mood, you might ask?

Because...

Pearl Jam sucks.

That's it! Finally, some moron left-wing entertainer whom I didn't like anyway, not named Streisand or Affleck, self-destructs! It's awesome!

[Pearl Jam has sucked, by the way, since the early Nineties. I've always been pleased with the way they flushed themselves down the toilet in the mid- to late-nineties with that string of (unusually) unlistenable albums. Now that their lyrics have ascended to lounge singer ridicule:

[T]he lyrics of "Bushleaguer," [] in part call Bush "a confidence man" and say, "He's not a leader / he's a Texas leaguer."

...I can be even happier!

"A Texas Leaguer?" What the hell does that mean? That he plays Class AA Baseball? That he's got a wicked slider, good heat, and a serviceable change, but they're trying to build up his endurance? That Eddie Vedder is blessedly approaching that mini-Eschaton I like to call "heroin overdose"? (Yes, I'm in a snippy mood today.)

To my friends from college who liked Pearl Jam, no matter how crappy the music got -- I'm looking at you, Matt -- HAHAHAHAHAHA!!]

Pardon the inappropriate outburst:

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Sorry.

Ok, not really.

It's Called a Primary, Terry

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the face of the modern Democrat party:

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee said he is concerned about infighting among some of the party's presidential candidates.

"I don't like that," DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe said Tuesday. "We need to make sure we are monitoring that. The focus of this is beating George Bush."

Much as I hate to stand up for a bunch of people whom, were they on the side of the road on fire, and I had to go to the little boys' room, I would just as soon skip over en route to the nearest gas station, I have to stick up for 'em on this one:

The point is not beating George Bush. The point is getting to a position where they can try to beat George Bush. Primaries aren't sweet and sappy affairs, Terry. Ain't the nature of the beast. Deal with it, and hope they don't get too bloodied.

Anyway, serves you right for letting the loony left in your party.

Thbbt.

Third-String QB: Team Needs New Starting Quarterback After Current QB Wins Superbowl and Superbowl MVP

Or at least, that seems to be the thrust of Kerry's drivel:

Regardless of how successful the United States is in waging war against Iraq, it will take a new president to rebuild the country's damaged relationships with the rest of the world, Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday.

Right. Inevitably, successful prosecution of a war means we need to throw out the bum who won it, right?

The Massachusetts senator has long said Saddam Hussein must be disarmed and removed from power, and he voted to give President Bush the authority to strike Iraq. But he has strongly criticized Bush for his actions leading to the war, saying the president should have given diplomacy more time and his failure to do so has alienated America's allies.

Yeah, that 18-month rush to war musta turned off all of those countries whose TARDISes were broken.

I'm looking at you, France.

''Because of the depth of this breach, because of the anger that exists with many countries and their leaders ... I don't think they're going to trust this president no matter what,'' Kerry said.

This is a bad thing, right? We want them to trust us why, exactly? So they can roll us like they did Bill "The [European] People Love Me" Clinton?

Yeah.

Kerry said he would heal relations with other countries by approaching the United Nations with an aggressive plan to make the United States a leader on international, environmental and health issues without ceding its right to defend itself.

In other news, scientists are seeking a way to destroy a human being's brain while leaving the person capable of walking and making major foreign policy speeches.

It worked with John Kerry, one of the scientists said, on the condition of anonymity.

''I believe we can have a golden age of American diplomacy,'' he said. He also defended his support of the USA Patriot Act which broadened the government's powers to shut down terrorist financiers and money launderers and the resolution giving Bush the authority to go to war against criticism that the measures eroded American civil liberties.

Something for everybody. The modern Democrat candidate.

He also said he looks forward to appointing an attorney general who reads and abides by the constitution of the United States.

...thereby breaking precedent with every Democrat president since Kennedy.

Jim Grant, whose Peterborough company offers training for teachers, asked Kerry about Bush's ''No Child Left Behind'' education law, calling it an unfounded mandate that will open the door to widespread use of school vouchers.

Kerry agreed, saying that the solution is fixing public schools, not building charter schools or using vouchers to allow children to be transferred. ''You can't build charter schools fast enough for an entire generation,'' he said.

(1) On the contrary, yes you can. And anyway, who said anything about building new schools?

(2) More importantly, who says you need to? Send the kids who need it to private schools; if parents are happy with their kids' current schools, no one's proposing shipping the little tykes off against their parents' wishes. (That's the sort of thing Democrats do.) So, not to be too large a fly in the ointment, but, well, we're not talking about building new schools for an entire generation; we're talking about sending a sizable portion of a generation to better schools.

Gods above, I'm looking forward to the Democrat primaries.

Courtesy of MedPundit, I bring you this from Overlawyered:

March 19 -- $12,000 a bed. "Nursing homes [in some states] now pay close to $12,000 per bed annually on liability insurance, according to [a new] report [by AON Risk Consultants]." Nationally, liability costs per bed grew from an average of $300 annually a decade ago to $1,120 in 1997 and $2,880 in 2002, according to the study. Defenders of rising litigation say it provides long-overdue recourse against bad care, but the former administrator of the recently closed Gadsden Nursing Home in Quincy. Florida, doesn't buy the idea that only poorly run homes can expect to be sued. "'We were ranked 51st out of 668 homes in the state the day we closed. If you're ranked in the top 7.5%, you're not a bad home,' he said." (Reuters Health, "Legal liability costs surge for US nursing homes", Mar. 14).

You'll pardon me if I'm in no mood to sob for nursing homes right now -- in the last eight months, I've seen cases from six different ones that involved one or more of the following: (1) dehydration; (2) gangrene (and limb loss); (3) skin anthrax (and limb loss); (4) ignored, critical medical emergencies (as in, immediate surgery was required); (5) actual abuse (striking, starving, locking away); and, (6) death.

So if they're paying more for insurance, I'm thinking there might be a reason.

Hot damn.

Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old private first class missing since the ambush of an Army maintenance company 10 days ago in southern Iraq, has been rescued by Special Operations forces, defense officials said yesterday.

Yes, that's the same Miss Lynch about whom I was lamenting earlier.

Deo gratias.

As my wife likes to ask, can we just nuke France now?

This, on the other hand, is a ... significantly more pleasant memory.

Hey, I saw this thing on Clash of the Titans.

Shiver. Not the best memory, in any sense.

Thanks for Nothing, Now Go Away

So -- for the sake of argument -- suppose that a popular music group’s fan base is made up predominantly of folks who didn’t, shall we say, pull the left lever in 2000. Suppose that group is under fire for anti-American anti-Bush remarks made abroad. Suppose that group wants nothing more than for the whole thing to go away.

You gotta ask yourself: Do the Dixie Chicks really want help from Al Gore?

And while we’re at it, Al is still off his rocker:

According to the Tennessean, Gore used recent attacks on the Dixie Chicks that followed anti-war comments by Natalie Maines as an example. Gore told the audience, "They were made to feel un-American and risked economic retaliation because of what was said. Our democracy has taken a hit," Gore said. "Our best protection is free and open debate."

So if I understand correctly, people -- for the sake of “our democracy” -- should not be allowed to criticize or boycott those with whom they disagree.

Sure. Makes sense to me.

I will skip ranting about how freedom of speech is freedom from government interference with speech, not freedom from being told you’re a moron by your fellow citizens. Let’s just say Al would be singing a different song if Maines had yelled, “I wish Hitler was our president!”

Sadaam Hussein, this asshole has pissed you off for
the last time.


What annoying Celebrity would you most likely wanna kill?
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Gee whiz, tell Mommy to stop babying you so much
and get out of the house once in a while. You
are the typical nerd. Congradulations, the
other kids walk all over you and make fun of
you, but you'll show them someday when you
develop the latest line of anti-depressants
that they will need when they are 35.


What kind of typical high school character from a movie are you?
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Some day my blog will come...

This is either worrisome or inaccurate:


Where do you fall on the liberal - conservative political spectrum? (United States)
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I mean, I'm not just one point out on the right, dangit. I'm a standing member of the VRWC!

Oh, I get it. Blogger's messed today.

So while I try to get my template sorted out, some light blogging:

I guess this means that the coke really went to Robin Williams's head all those years ago, after all. Because, you know, it's one thing to say shit like this when we're at peace; you have to be high as a kite to offer it in the middle of a war.

The thing I really like about Powell's speech warning Syria and Iran about a smackdown is not so much the content -- let's be honest, it was just a verbal rebuke, we lack the cajones to back it up -- as where it was given: AIPAC. I mean, is there a better way to tell off crazy Arab (and Persian) fanatics, be they religious or secular, than to do so in front of a bunch of Jews? And Zionist ones at that?

Good for Powell, and good for AIPAC.